


The Reverb in Those Holy Halls

by igrab



Category: Supernatural
Genre: M/M, sam has thinky thoughts, the shipping is v light i'm sorry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-12
Updated: 2014-02-12
Packaged: 2018-01-12 01:24:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 530
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1180248
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/igrab/pseuds/igrab
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sam Winchester dreams about death.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Reverb in Those Holy Halls

_I want trees instead of gravestones and nothing to confess  
I got a soft spot for your ancient books of horror stories_

Sam Winchester dreams about death.

He doesn’t have nightmares anymore, not the way he used to. He knows now that when an angel takes you, it leaves a piece of its Grace behind, and he figures that must have been what made him hallucinate, what Castiel took back into himself to fix him. Before Purgatory, before the trials. Before Sam stared Death in the eye and thought, _I’m ready_.

He had been so ready to die.

It’s become something of an obsession, now. What happens, really? He’s been to Heaven but it’s hazy and hard to remember, and now he’s not sure if it’s even real. How can it be, when death is supposed to be this great unknown?

So he dreams about death, and they aren’t nightmares.

One night, he dreams of a forest full of trees, big strong oaks with lush foliage and the sun dappling the warm, soft grass. He knows, in the way that you do in dreams, that this was once a graveyard, long ago. He knows there is nothing left of the stones; they’ve long been broken down by questing roots, that the bodies of the dead were fed to the soil and the bones make anchors for the tall, tall trees. He knows that there is no one left to remember these people that came to rest here, and it doesn’t make him sad—no, far from it. He cries at how free it must feel, to know that no one is mourning, no one is sad. Anger, pain, loss, love—all these things and more are irrelevant. They no longer matter. Graves of people he’s saved and people he’s killed could lie side by side and no one would ever know.

One night, he dreams of a library.

It’s old in that he knows (in the way that you do, in dreams) that this library has stood for centuries, but it’s new in that time doesn’t seem to have touched it. There is no cracked and crumbling leather here, no pages that time has blurred, languages changed, maps smeared with the wear of constant use. He wanders the shelves and takes books at random and he can read them, he can understand, he’s at once a little boy falling into a story for the first time and a hunter, finding exactly the right answer even if he hadn’t asked the right questions. It doesn’t feel like trespassing, this is a library and the books want to be read. He knows this. He hears the gentle rustle of wingbeats and knows he’s not alone.

He wakes up to his face plastered to an old angelology text. Presumably he’d been looking for information on Gadreel, for he’s certainly in the G’s, but the angel welcoming his cheek in sleep had been a different one. One that, even now, years later, Sam realizes he’s still trying to understand.

He touches the face of the icon of the archangel Gabriel, and wonders if there is such a thing as an afterlife for angels, too.


End file.
